during the last update something went wrong and now my system is broken.

Problem:The system boots fine and shows the graphical login screen but once I fill in my credentials and press enter, the screen just turns black except for the mouse cursor, which I can still move. Apart of that, nothing happens, the screen stays black except for the mouse. I can switch to the terminals (ctrl-alt-fx). All packages are installed nicely, apt-get is telling me I'm completely up-to-date.

Analysis I've done so far:- Starting a graphical session from the console (either xstart oder service mdm restart/start) leads to the same result- Adding a new test user and logging in as the test user does also not solve the problem. Thus my profile does not seem to be the problem.- I do not have a /etc/X11/Xorg.conf file, but according to my research this should be ok...? In fact I already tried creating a dummy Xorg.conf containing just a short entry for the radeon driver, but this also did not have any effect.- The graphics card worked nicely before the update. I already tried installing lots of different versions of free and non-free drivers, to no avail.- I checked the Xorg logs, they contain no error messages.- mdm is installed correctly

I've spent this whole day with trying stuff and crawling forums and irc channels and now I have no further idea on what to do. What annoys me most is that I don't even know what the problem is! Is it some X configuration stuff? Is it a driver problem? Or something completely different?

Uhm yeah... .... I just realized that obviously MATE got uninstalled during the update. I was quite sure that it was there since "sudo service mdm restart/start" or "/etc/init.d/mdm start/restart" did not issue any error messages, but checking whether the packages were actually there revealed that they were NOT.

I was already annoyed when I accidentally discovered this temporary solution for laptop HP 248 G1...Keep pressing Alt and left arrow keys, then Esc key when prompted by the black login screen (I don' know what to call it )